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MONTREAL—Thomas Mulcair believes one of the toughest days in his political career was also one of his defining moments.

After a tense meeting with Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest on a cold February day in 2006, in which Charest informed his environment minister of what amounted to a demotion, Mulcair took about an hour to make sure his family was on board with his plan.

Thomas Mulcair, the front-runner in the NDP leadership race, has been accused of alienating caucus colleagues but he says solidarity is a priority. (Peter Mccabe / THE TORONTO STAR)

“He’s saying he’s going to move me off environment, put me into this other thing (government services). It’s of no interest to me whatsoever,” Mulcair, 57, recalls telling his wife Catherine and their two sons. “It’s clearly to get me out of these files, and I think I’m just going to resign instead (on principle).”

The response he says his family gave him sounds saccharine coming from the bearded firebrand, but the man has a mind like a steel trap and an even stronger ego.

“ ‘You’ve been doing an amazing job in environment, and you’re doing the right thing to step down,’ ” Mulcair says they told him.

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The story of his resignation after refusing to sign off on a development project at Mount Orford provincial park has since morphed into a legend larger than the headlines it created at the time.

Mulcair, who has become the one to beat in the federal New Democratic leadership race, mentions it often, with pride in his voice. He does again over lunch at a sun-filled café on bustling St. Denis St. in Montreal as he describes what happened next.

“Jack (Layton) called me a couple of months after and he said, ‘Look, my grandfather quit cabinet in Quebec on a question of principle.’ He always had a way of finding a connection.”

Like Layton, Mulcair has politics in his genes. His great-great grandfather, Honoré Mercier, was Quebec premier in the 1880s and 1890s, and Mulcair says he studied law at McGill University more out of a desire to be a politician later in life than for any other reason.

He nonetheless began his career as a lawyer for the Quebec government. Revealingly, he worked both for the Conseil supérieur de la langue française, which monitors the use of French in the province, and as legal director for the English-language rights group Alliance Quebec.

Mulcair arrived in the Quebec National Assembly in 1994 after being recruited, in his words, as “a star candidate” for the Liberals following a high-profile stint as president of the Quebec professions board.

(In that position, he pushed the Quebec College of Physicians and Surgeons to take stronger action against sexual misconduct by doctors.)

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The new Liberal MNA for Chomedy in Laval, the suburb north of Montreal where he grew up, quickly gained a reputation as a rough-and-tumble attack dog.

Quebec Justice Minister Jean-Marc Fournier, who was first elected the same year as Mulcair, remembers his colleague’s parliamentary jousting skills.

“When someone would try to evade the question, he ... hit directly where it hurt. He knew the issue and he went straight to the heart of things, with a tone that could be intimidating. He is not afraid to skate into the corners of the rink.”

Mulcair says his ability to take on the government of the day — which he did as deputy House leader while the Liberals were the opposition to the Parti Québécois government — is something the NDP grassroots should seriously consider when casting their ballots.

“(The PQ) were very similar to Stephen Harper’s Conservative majority government,” says Mulcair, who was dubbed “The Grizzly” in the National Assembly, a nickname that has stuck to this day.

“They both believe that they serve a higher purpose and that the normal rules don’t apply to them. The only way to take them on was to be at work at 5 in the morning, to build a very tough, structured, determined, organized Official Opposition.”

That strong-headed approach is as evident behind the scenes as it is in the spotlight. Some NDP caucus colleagues view as a weakness and a reason not to support his leadership bid. Others see it in a more positive light.

Caucus members describe, on background, a my-way-or-the-highway approach to tense discussions that rub some people the wrong way. Numerous sources mention there was a time when Mulcair refused to attend meetings following a disagreement with a colleague.

Former federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who supports rival candidate Brian Topp, added his punches this week, saying Mulcair would have trouble holding caucus together. “It’s one thing to be forceful and direct, and both Tom and Brian are that … but in terms of demonstrated capacity at team-building, I think Brian is the better candidate,” he told the Star Thursday.

Mulcair says he does not want to betray the trust of caucus colleagues by divulging details of confidential discussions, but notes he “obviously had a lot to learn” from Layton about how to build solidarity around contentious issues, such as the federal gun registry.

“Jack’s answer always was: ‘If my caucus is so profoundly divided, it’s a reflection of a profound division in Canadian society, and I’ve got to work to try to find the solution,’ ” Mulcair says of the late leader’s approach. And if he wins, he will make caucus solidarity a priority: “We don’t have the luxury of losing anybody.”

Mulcair has secured endorsements from 43 NDP MPs, including former leadership candidates Robert Chisholm and Romeo Saganash, which is more than three times the endorsements secured by veteran strategist Topp, the favourite of the party establishment.

“Tom is passionate and he’s principled, and I think that can sometimes be challenging for people to deal with. But I think we need that,” says Don Davies, one of the incumbent MPs endorsing Mulcair. “He brings discipline to our caucus … that I think is required to convince Canadians that we’re ready to govern in 2015. So what some people may view as a weakness, I view as a strength.”

The leadership race has rubbed some of the rougher edges off Mulcair’s combative personality, though he still exhibits a tendency to describe how wonderful he is or to challenge an unsupported assertion, but with more patience and a twinkle in his eye.

Mulcair points out he has run a positive campaign, but that does not mean he has not said anything that others perceived to be inflammatory.

At the heart of many of the suspicions surrounding him is his past with the Liberal party — which Mulcair, who first joined the NDP in 1974, notes is the only provincial party in which a federalist can find a home in Quebec — but it is also the part of his career that makes him a strong candidate for leadership.

Mulcair believes Charest, who declined to be interviewed, appointed him environment minister in 2003 because he was looking for someone willing and able to enforce the rules the way Mulcair did during his six years heading the Quebec professions board.

“It’s not so much that you require more legislation in the field of environment. You need the political will to enforce it, because you’re always butting heads against very powerful interests that are basically used to calling the shots,” says Mulcair.

His legacy as environment minister included a government-wide sustainable development program and rules requiring corporations to shoulder the cost of inspections.

“You’ll never hear me speaking against the development of the oilsands,” he says. “But you will hear me say that the basic principles of sustainable development, like internalization of costs — polluter pay, user pay — have to be applied.”

In 2005, the feisty minister made headlines when he told the National Assembly the word “contempt” did not go far enough in describing the attitude of Stéphane Dion, then federal environment minister under Paul Martin, as the provincial Liberals tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a deal for Quebec under the Kyoto accord.

“I think he went over the top,” Dion said in an interview last year.

Mulcair says he was simply standing up for Quebec, which had already taken steps to combat climate change that he wanted Ottawa to take into account.

Dion was not the only person with whom Mulcair clashed during his tenure in provincial cabinet. There was the matter of his boss. A series of disagreements chilled relations between him and Charest, culminating in the standoff over Mount Orford.

“It was just not possible for me to sign an order-in-council transferring land in a provincial park to the developers to build condos,” says Mulcair, describing the episode as an example of his lifelong belief in the importance of standing up for what is right or, as he puts it in French, “se tenir debout.”

Upon arriving on Parliament Hill nearly two years later, Mulcair says some of his new colleagues were still angst-ridden over having helped defeat the Martin government in November 2005, with the Liberals accusing them of moving Canada backwards on Kyoto and a national child care plan in the wake of the subsequent Tory victory.

“I said to them, ‘Would you stop feeling guilty? They had 13 years. They did nothing. They didn’t get thrown out by us. They got thrown out by the Canadian voter,’ ” Mulcair recalls.

Shortly after the 2011 federal election, which sent 59 NDP MPs to Quebec, Layton sent Mulcair, whom he had named Opposition House Leader, to meet Charest and begin rebuilding a good working relationship.

“We have very correct relations and it’s going to be maintained that way,” Mulcair says, acknowledging that when he and Charest bumped into each other at events in the years after his resignation their relations had been cordial but forced. “The French talk about un devoir d’état (civic duty), which is superior to un devoir personnel (personal duty).”

So where does his civic duty lie?

“Once a Liberal, always a Liberal,” Mulcair himself told a Laval weekly newspaper in 2007, not long before Layton unveiled him in a Montreal park as his new star candidate in the Outremont byelection.

More than a year earlier Mulcair had spoken about the environment at the 2006 NDP policy convention in Quebec City, which he notes with pride had not gone unnoticed by the media.

But there had also been an invitation from the federal Conservatives to be an “environmental ambassador.” Mulcair says the offer was tempting because his sudden departure from cabinet had been “extremely difficult.”

“You’re seeking to be part of realizing the things that you had said you were going to do. But if you get to the stage where you realize it’s just not going to happen that way …” Mulcair muses.

“I mean, it could have been of interest to me to assume a position in the upper public administration in the area of the environment.”

Mulcair addressed his flirtation with the Conservatives back when Layton announced his move to the NDP, saying he rejected the offer because it was clear the Harper government would not change its stance on Kyoto. He sticks to that, dismissing recent anonymous suggestions that things had been otherwise as “ridiculous.”

Mulcair is clearly a politician with a healthy ambition, but queries, while Layton was still alive, about whether he hoped to run for NDP leader one day were met with visible annoyance.

“It was always a bit tough for me to try to answer very simply, ‘I have no ambition beyond growing the party in Quebec and working tirelessly to accomplish that,’ because that was the simple truth,” recalls Mulcair, who found the incessant queries at the time “galling.”

There was nothing obviously ambitious, he says, about someone taking on the thankless task of growing the NDP in Quebec when the party had only ever won one seat in the province and then quickly lost it.

Today, there is another question dogging him. Will he run again for the NDP even if he loses the leadership race on March 24? His answer is yes.

“I have been working flat out for five years across Quebec to build to the result that we had on May 2,” Mulcair told reporters following the all-candidates debate in Montreal earlier this month.

“I will continue to work enthusiastically, but I think I might allow myself a little vacation.”

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